Francis "Frank" McCourt (August 19, 1930 – July 19, 2009) was an Irish-American teacher and writer. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel Angela's Ashes, a tragicomic memoir of the misery and squalor of his childhood.[1]

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Frank McCourt was born in New York City's Brooklyn borough, on 19 August 1930 to Malachy McCourt, an ex-IRA man from Moneyglass, Antrim (1899–1985), and Irish Catholic mother Angela Sheehan from Limerick (1908–1981).[2][3] Frank McCourt lived in New York with his parents and four younger siblings: Malachy, born in 1931; twins Oliver and Eugene, born in 1932; and a younger sister, Margaret, who died just seven weeks after birth, in 1935.[2] In the midst of the Great Depression, the family moved back to Ireland. Unable to find steady work in Belfast or Dublin and beset by Malachy Senior's alcoholism, the McCourt family returned to their mother's native Limerick, where they sank even deeper into poverty.[2] They lived in a rain-soaked slum, the parents and children sharing one bed together, McCourt's father drinking away what little money they had.[2] The twins Oliver and Eugene died in early childhood due to the squalor of their circumstances, and two more boys were born,[2] Michael, who now lives in San Francisco, and Alphonsus, who lives in Manhattan. Frank McCourt himself nearly died of typhoid fever when he was 11.

McCourt related that when he was 11, his father left Limerick to find work in the factories of wartime Coventry, England, rarely sending back money to support his family. Eventually McCourt recounts that Malachy Senior abandoned Frank's mother altogether, leaving her to raise her four surviving children, on the edge of starvation, without any source of income.[2] Frank's school education ended at age 13,[2] when the Irish Christian Brothers ejected him. Frank then held odd jobs and stole bread and milk in an effort to provide for his mother and three surviving brothers.

In October 1949, at the age of 19, McCourt left Ireland, using money he had saved from a post office job.[2] Alternatively, in a TV interview McCourt says that one of the people to whom he delivered telegrams was a female moneylender from whom, after her death, he stole the £55 for the trip.[4] He took a boat from Cork to New York City. A priest he had met on the ship got him a room to stay in and his job at New York City's Biltmore Hotel. He earned about $26 a week and sent $10 of it to his mother in Limerick. Brothers Malachy and Michael followed him to New York and so, later, did their mother Angela.[2] In 1951, McCourt was drafted during the Korean War and sent to Bavaria for two years initially training dogs, then as a clerk. Upon his discharge from the US Army, he returned to New York City, where he held a series of jobs on docks, in warehouses, and in banks.[2]

McCourt was accused of greatly exaggerating his family's impoverished upbringing by many Limerick natives, including Richard Harris[2][10] and author Gerrard Hannan who, seeing McCourt's writings as vicious and inaccurate slurs on Limerick, wrote Ashes and Tis In Me Ass in response to Angela's Ashes and 'Tis. McCourt's own mother had denied the accuracy of his stories shortly before her death in 1981.[2]

McCourt was married first, in August 1961 (div. 1979), to Alberta Small, with whom he had a daughter, Margaret.[2] He married a second time in November 1984 (div. 1989) to psychotherapist Cheryl Floyd.[2] He married his third wife, Ellen Frey McCourt, in August 1994, and they lived in New York City and Roxbury, Connecticut.[2]

In his free time, McCourt took up the casual sport of rowing. He once sank his WinTech recreational single scull on the Mohawk River in New York, and had to be rescued by a local rowing team.

In October 2009, the New York City Department of Education, along with several partners from the community, founded the Frank McCourt High School of Writing, Journalism, and Literature, a screened-admissions public high school. The school is located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on West 84th Street. The Frank McCourt School is one of four small schools designated to fill the campus of the former Louis D. Brandeis High School. The Frank McCourt High School began classes September 2010. The first principal of the school is Danielle Salzberg, who previously served as acting principal at Khalil Gibran International Academy and as an assistant principal at Millennium High School in New York. Among the many community partners of the Frank McCourt school are the Columbia Journalism School and Symphony Space.

The Frank McCourt Museum was officially opened by Malachy McCourt in July 2011 at Leamy House, Hartstonge Street, Limerick.[13] This Tudor-style building was formerly known as the Leamy School, the former school of Frank and his brother Malachy. The museum showcases the 1930s classroom of Leamy School and contains a collection of memorabilia, including items such as school books of the period and old photos, all donated by former pupils of the school. As well as having a large selection of Angela's Ashes memorabilia, the museum has recreated the McCourt home as described in the book using period pieces and props from the Angela's Ashes motion picture. The downstairs of the museum houses the Dr. Frank McCourt Creative Writing centre.[14]

^ abGrossman, Lev (19 July 2009). "Frank McCourt, 'Angela's Ashes' Author, Dies". TIME. Retrieved 4 April 2013. For most of his life, until he was well into his 60s, Frank McCourt wasn't a writer; he was a teacher. But it is as a writer, the author of the wildly successful memoir Angela's Ashes, that he will be remembered. He died on July 19 in New York of meningitis. He was 78 years old.

^Byrne, Terry (4 February 2013). "Frank McCourt’s ‘The Irish… and How They Got That Way’ is a celebration - Theater & art - The Boston Globe". Frank McCourt’s ‘The Irish… and How They Got That Way’ is a celebration - Theater & art - The Boston Globe. Retrieved 4 April 2013. The proceedings bear out a determination to set the record straight about the tragedy of the Great Famine, and evince a reverence for John F. Kennedy, a pride in iconic Irish-Americans George M. Cohan and James Cagney, and a humorous, slightly bitter attitude toward British oppression.